AI and the Writer: A Tool, Not a Replacement
A working novelist's honest view on generative AI — where it helps, where it flattens, and why the sentence still belongs to you.
I am asked, more or less weekly now, what I think of AI as a writer. My honest answer is that it is a tool, and like all tools, it is neither good nor bad. It is only as useful as the person holding it and only as dangerous as the person mistaking it for the work.
There are things it does well. It is a patient research assistant. It will summarise a hundred pages of source material in a minute, and though it will occasionally invent a fact, so will a tired human. It is a competent proofreader, catching the small collapses of grammar that every writer's eye slides over on the fifth read.
There are things it does badly. It flattens a voice. It reaches, always, for the most probable next word — and the most probable next word is almost never the right one. Good prose is a series of small refusals of the obvious. The machine, by design, cannot refuse.
Use it for scaffolding. Use it for admin. Use it for the parts of the writing life that are not the writing. But when it comes to the sentence, put the machine away. The sentence has to be yours, or it is not literature. It is content.
There is a difference. It matters more now than it ever did.
